New: President Trump's resistance to intel warnings about Russia led his national security team to verbally brief him less often on Russia-related threats to the US

(Reporting adapted from my upcoming book “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World”) https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/politics/trump-intel-briefings-russia/index.html

“According to one former senior intelligence official, the President's briefers had one simple rule with Trump: never lead with Russia.”

“It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where he hears less and less of what he doesn't want to hear and therefore starts to believe more and more that the Russians aren't doing anything bad," a former senior NSC official said.

“Trump's briefers discovered that when his oral briefing included intelligence related to Russia's malign activities against the United States...Trump would often blow up at them, demanding to know why they kept focusing on Russia and often questioning the intelligence itself”